THE RIGHT TO CULTURE 51 must persistently trouble any reasonable person: the ban on Satanic Verses; the immolation of Roop Kanwar and the Shah Bano case. I wish to raise a specific question in relation to these issues: How is a leftist who also takes his liberalism seriously to respond to these situations? How is he to react to a setting in which (a) the majority in a community seek a ban on a work of fiction on the ground that it offends their religious sensibility; (b) a woman immolated herself on the alleged plea that she is intentionally performing an age-old, much revered custom; (c) women of a particular religious group are denied alimony because this is impermissible under the law laid down by the holy book. An initial, intuitive reaction of the left-liberal is to dismiss these actions as medieval, primitive and obscurantist. His enlightened sensibility treats all religious practices as humbug and some of these, including those under discussion, particularly offensive. Since his liberalism permits the use of the language of rights, he might claim that such practices violate individual rights, particularly those of women. Since a liberal state is committed to the defence of such rights, he would seek state intervention on such matters. Another set of intellectuals argue, however, that such leftist response is radically mistaken, that it mindlessly follows mainstream western thinking on these issues, and therefore, that it is eurocentric. In short, it simply fails to understand what is going on here. The term 'understand* is to be taken in all its philosophical seriousness. To not understand these situations is to bypass the internal descriptions of the participants of a culture, to fail to grasp the way religious people conceive their own specific situation. It is to overlook the self-perceptions of the agents, their own complex intentions, motivations and orientations. In brief, here is an implicit attempt to finesse the self^understanding and interpretation of participants by forcing upon them an external framework that is completely out of tune with their beliefs and value judgements. This total failure of understanding shows the bankruptcy of the leftists, so the argument goes, who cannot see that, given their conceptual world, what the agents do just is the right thing to do. Furthermore, if what they do is right in the context, then within that context they have a right to perform that action. After all, a group of people possesses a right to follow its own customs and practices, live in accordance with its idea of how lives ought to be led. Taking recourse to the same liberal discourse on rights, these intellectuals, enraged by the blind rationalism of the left, go on to claim that a people have a right to their own culture. If they take their liberalism seriously, so the argument goes, leftists should recognise this right. Indeed, if they do not hold their liberalism in bad faith, they should leave these people alone. Rather than seek state intervention, they should demand that the state must let these people decide what is good for themselves. Is it not true that what is wrong for